Hemberly
Transcript My name is Danica Hemberly, & I write this today (Year of Our Lord 218) as a rememberens of the Oldtown & hot iw came to its final. I am now, its possible, the only bodied soul in all of Eden, a truth not known sins Adams day. For these lass near-thirty years sins the so called Great Pilgrimage our numbers hav fallen. Me being the youngess left, its true I took it on me to provide a new generation, but it wasnt Gods will, no, & me ive staved the youngess til now Im the lass, & I dont plan to be the lass for long. Yes, Oldtown has lived long, but now it muss fall & becom another ruin, the lass ruin I rite today that it not be forgotten. The trouble began with those Ada & Josselin, who returned from the dark wilds spreading terrible mischief & madness. That the ruins wer not all dead, that they wer not forsaken ny the Father, that we werent alone & mos madly that these others had fooled death & cured sickness. Such arrogans, you mite think! Well old myths & rumors are not easily put to ress. Me I heard these stories & others less fanciful in my youth. When I was new, the other hunters told me fals tails of cities of lite & cities of nite, of animals that glowed pale under the moon, of wild men who sprung from the wet earth & lived ther whole lives out ther. But I was blessed thank the Lord with a Father who cared for me, & when He heard me repeat such things He quickly punished me, & warned me of the dangers of fals hood. One mother who Id been clos to later told me of a time when in her new years shed heard such tails too. Long-lived childish myths. But ther wer always the occasional few yough whod hear such tails & run off with the surness that they'd find them true. Ada & Joss wer the firs ever to com back, fars Ive ever heard, & they claimed tove seen proof, tove met an other out ther whod lived many lives. Well they wer captured yes & punished, but it werent enuf really, theyd told ther tail & ther wer many ready to hear it. Maybe itd been a hard year, too hard a year, & folks, specially young ones, they wanted to believ something foolish. Too many of them Wise & Respected wer killed when the young hunters ros up to free the liars to be led out to death in the dark nite. We held together some months after that, but it wasnt long til others wer leaving in groups in the nite, & the Oldtown got sad & quiet, though the Father got louder surely. A year & some later, in YL 190, when the Wise & Respected had calmed & the new young had fully & quietly organized themselves, thats when, after some public discussion & arguments, us trying to stop them & them trying to bring us, thats when we saw the Pilgrimage, thats when the Oldtown braethed its lass true breath, sins thats when the Oldtown loss its lass chans for a new generation. The ress of us, we stayed true & lived our lives out hear. Mosly we wer too old to hunt, but our numbers were so small, the smallness theyd been sins the start, & our farms held out enuf, paired with our stores, to keep us going as longs we hav. Perhaps its true, I think some times, may be therer others out ther, other folks in the other villages, but even so I could never leav. I dont regrit for one moment staying behind to tend to the Oldtown, to preserve it bess I could. Sure, I miss mine. All of us did. But thats aside now. It wasnt us who left, was it.